The IAB, in reviewing these materials has one concern beyond those already provided by the GNSO. The one concern is that in a number of environments the use of certain domain suffixes (e.g., .local) is common. Although the use of these suffixes is not standardized, nor are these suffixes registered in any manner, the introduction of such suffixes could lead to instability.

We also observe that while a terse reference to RFC 2606 is provided in the Glossary section of the ICANN GNSO “Final Report on Introduction of New Generic Top-Level Domains”, the reserved names themselves are not all included in the document, nor are they included in the “DNS Stability: The Effect of New Generic Top Level Domains on the Internet Domain Name System” document itself.

We would recommend that an appropriate technical ICANN committee (RSAC, RSTEP or SSAC) would assess, for each new gTLD proposed, if said gTLD would cause technical problems.